Department of Book Reports: “We Called Each Other Comrade”

Allen Ruff’s “We Called Each Other Comrade”: Charles H. Kerr & Company, Radical Publishers (PM Press
$24.95) is social history at it’s best. The subject of the book is
Charles H. Kerr, who began publishing Unitarian tracts and books,
starting in 1886, was a pioneer of books published in cheap editions and
made accessible for the average man. Kerr (1860-1944) led a very
interesting life, filled with ideas with many stops along the way. The
books he published reflected an intellectual curiosity and showed his
migration from Unitarianism, to Marxism, the Socialist Party, the
Industrial Workers of the World, and finally to the Proletarian Party, a
splinter group of the original Communist Party of America.

Ruff’s
gift to us in this book is not only the examination of one mans life,
but an exploration of ideas current in the late 19th century and into
the Pre-World War One years on the left. Along the way we get a history
of book publishing (centered mostly in New York, but with a strong
presence in Chicago, where Kerr’s house was located); the drift of
Unitarian thought from it’s Congregational roots to the church we would
recognize now; to Marxist ideas in American thought; a history of the
origins of the Socialist Party, which had a big hand in the founding of
the IWW, otherwise known affectionately as the Wobblies; to the
suppression of Left opposition to the “imperialist” first world war; and
it describes the fractious and turbulent history of the American Left,
which resonates even today. It is fascinating stuff.

Kerr
himself revolutionized in many ways book publishing, offering books,
pamphlets and ephemera at low cost to the customer. Always a man who
thought education important, he wanted to make readily available these
ideas to the common person. He also started the journal, International
Socialist Review (ISR), which along with the Masses, was a very
important vehicle for left-wing thought, and became another victim of
the Great War when Kerr was not allowed to send it through the mails..
Kerr also translated from the French, the English lyrics to the
Socialist anthem, The Internationale, which begins Arise Ye Prisoners of
starvation/ Arise Ye wretched of the Earth, which many of you might
recognize from the Franz Fanon anti-colonial book. He was a man of
solid, middle-class background, who, as he got older, moved more and
more to the Left.

The Charles H. Kerr Company
still exists today and it’s slogan is “Subversive Literature for the
Whole Family Since 1886. This is the second edition of “We Called Each
Other Comrade”, first published in the mid 1990’s and reissued by PM
Press with a new foreword by Paul Buhle, a noted historian of American
radicalism. I should note that the publisher
provided me with a copy & a super cool sticker gratis. This book
brims with ideas and reminds us that what we suffer today is not new,
and must be opposed. “We have been nought/ We shall be all”.